More european megacities.

We define megacity as agglomeration with more than 10 million inhabitants.

Currently, there are four such agglomerations in Europe: London, Paris, Moscow and Istanbul.

What POD would be needed to create another ones by now? I am not sure how far in past we'd need to go back, that's why I'm putting it into pre-1900 thread.

Note: OTL Rhine-Ruhr areas doesn't count since it is polycentric areas too spread out to resemble a single city.
 
We define megacity as agglomeration with more than 10 million inhabitants.

Currently, there are four such agglomerations in Europe: London, Paris, Moscow and Istanbul.

What POD would be needed to create another ones by now? I am not sure how far in past we'd need to go back, that's why I'm putting it into pre-1900 thread.

Note: OTL Rhine-Ruhr areas doesn't count since it is polycentric areas too spread out to resemble a single city.


Rhine-Ruhr would count if you count "New Bosnywash" in the USA (the line of continuous urban/suburban area from Boston to DC)

A Rome that was never sacked & fought over could have 10 million by now
 
A Rome that was never sacked & fought over could have 10 million by now

So, we're expecting a city not being sacked. Ever. For 2000 years.

Seriously, even if Rome was less sacked than OTL, you'll still have to deal with epidemics, recurrent malaria, burnings (More or less caricaturally, burnings in Rome were prevented by the floods of the Tibre) and economical decline.

A more realistic choice in Italy would be Naples/Napoli. It was one of the most populated cities of Europe and worldide before 1850 and still one of the greatest cities in Mediteranean Basin.
You'll need a longer prosperity for the town, making it attractive for migrants (nowadays, you won't find many foreign migrants in the agglomeration).

Still, you won't reach more than 2 millions, 4 at best. Not without great changes.

Milan could be interesting as well, critically if the city doesn't know the decline of XVII/XIX centuries. You may need a powerful and independent Duchy of Milan, possibly dominant in Northern italy.
 
St. Petersburg could be possible if Russia is able to have less casualties in its wars or totally avoid them. Staying as the capital of Russia would help too.
 
I support this POD idea, though only under the condition that the ATL euromegacities will have this as a theme song. :p
 
Megacities require big and preferably centralized countries; if Germany were somehow united as a non-federal state at the beginning of its industrialization, then its capital might have 10 million or more people today.
 
Looking at the population lists on Wikipedia:
Barcelona and Madrid are both at roughly 4-5 million people. If you avoid the unification of Spain (e.g. by having Ferdinand's son survive or maybe a different outcome of the War of Spanish Succession), I could see one of these cities growing larger. For that matter, avoiding the Spanish Civil War would probably help a lot as well, although probably too late to boost the population quite that much.
 
Looking at the population lists on Wikipedia:
Barcelona and Madrid are both at roughly 4-5 million people. If you avoid the unification of Spain (e.g. by having Ferdinand's son survive or maybe a different outcome of the War of Spanish Succession), I could see one of these cities growing larger..

Irrelevant.
The prosperity of Barcelona is due to its economical and commercial power in Mediterranean basin. Maybe limitating the Ottoman rise in Europe would help, but preventing the unification of Castile and Aragon isn't going to help : Venice, Genoa, Marseilles, etc didn't became megacities and there's no real incitative for Barcelona to became such.

The prosperity of Madrid is due to the relocalisation of institutions of Castile, and the will of making it a "new city".
 
istanbul today has ~14 million people. how much larger could it get if the ottomans stay out of wars and it stays the center of a large, sprawling empire?

in 1914 istanbul had just around 900.000 people.
 
A more stable Poland-Lithuania might get a Warsaw of 10 million or more. Perhaps a different HRE could see Vienna or Frankfurt or something grow massive?

EDIT: Another possibility is to have the Mongolians smash their way into Europe, destroying smaler cities are resulting in more centralised states.
 
You need to remember that some locations are going to be constrained prior to the 20th century by water supply and the logistics of getting food into a city not on the coast (or super huge river like Moscow). Rome is certainly one of those.

I'd agree with Naples, or possible a Vienna/Budapest which has the Danube basin unified and peaceful for a lot more time than occured OTL.
 
Could the Rhine-Ruhr area be less polycentric, i.e. Greater Essen?

Also I think Milan has a lot of potential, unlike Venice and Genoa it doesn't really have hard geographical boundaries and the Po plain is incredibly fertile meaning it can enter the industrial age quite large. Add to that plenty of scope for industrialisation it could grow to mega-city status as the Capital of a Kingdom of Northern Italy/Super Duchy of Milan.
 
I'm not sure preindustrial conditions are that important. Megacities are a relatively recent phenomenon and seem to depend much more on serving a large, cohesive hinterland. That is also what I suspect is behind Europe's relative lack of them: most of its countries aren't big and cohesive enough. You have the populated, historically stable places, Russia, France, Britain whjich produced one each. You have Turkey, which retained the population to develop one even after the end of the Ottoman Empire. Beyonds that, the only countries that had the population potential would be Germany and Italy, both of which are traditionally polycentric. Maybe, if history had gone differently, Berlin could have done it, but I doubt it. Germany's centrifugal forces are strong. I don't know enough about Italy, but also doubt Rome could have. Mostr other countries simply didn't have the population to sustain so large a city, and developing a cross-border hinterland was not really feasible in the 19th and 20th century (if it had been, a Dutch city would make a good candidate).
 
The thing isn't that cities haven't 'managed' to reach this size. Its that this size isn't seen as desirable. Many European countries have measures actively in place to limit city size.
You'd need a change of philosophy which encourages sprawl.
 
Mostr other countries simply didn't have the population to sustain so large a city, and developing a cross-border hinterland was not really feasible in the 19th and 20th century (if it had been, a Dutch city would make a good candidate).
I'm not sure. Currently the Netherlands doesn't even have a city with than 1 milion people. I think the population of the Netherlands or even Holland is too widespread for a megacity. In a way the population of the Netherlands has always been quite decentralized for a megacity. So I have my doubts. Unless, you start to count the entire "randstad" as 1 city. In that case we are already pretty close with (according to wikipedia) more than 7 million people.
 
As has been said by Jonathan, Megacities require large centralized countries, and preferably ones that have been centralized for hundreds of years. There is a reason that Paris and London are the largest cities in non-Russian Europe. There are a number of cities you could potentially get to be as large as both.

Milan - Say that the Viscontis manage to unify a significant chunk of Italy in the 1400's. Milan would have the advantage of being the capital of a fairly large state. It would lack the easy sea access that London had, but Paris lacked this as well and was able to grow to a large size.

Vienna - If the Austro-Hungarian Empire is kept together, and the Empire keeps industrializing as it did prior to World War One (with a heavy emphasis on Austria itself as well as Bohemia) than it is possible, with some luck, that Vienna could become this big. This does require a bit of luck though, as Vienna prior to Industrialization was a smaller city than either London or Paris.

Frankfurt - Perhaps if there is some kind of Liberal German Empire, it could grow to mega-city proportions if made the capital. If you count the metropolitan area, it is bigger than quite a number of substantial capitals in Europe even now.

I was tempted to put Kiev on a list of possibilities too, if one could save it from the Mongols, but considering the butterfly effect, the Industrial Revolution could seriously be delayed. I'll put this one as an honorable mention.
istanbul today has ~14 million people. how much larger could it get if the ottomans stay out of wars and it stays the center of a large, sprawling empire?

in 1914 istanbul had just around 900.000 people.
It reached that figure without significant industrialization. If at least part of the Balkans were kept (even just 1912 borders) it could have enough of a hinterland to be fairly secure, and receive even more investment from a surviving Ottoman Government. You could be looking at Constantinople/Istanbul potentially having an even larger population.
 
I'm not sure. Currently the Netherlands doesn't even have a city with than 1 milion people. I think the population of the Netherlands or even Holland is too widespread for a megacity. In a way the population of the Netherlands has always been quite decentralized for a megacity. So I have my doubts. Unless, you start to count the entire "randstad" as 1 city. In that case we are already pretty close with (according to wikipedia) more than 7 million people.

I'd think its fair to count the Randstad. True cities don't follow administrative divisions.
 
I'd think its fair to count the Randstad. True cities don't follow administrative divisions.
Quite, it not only covers various cities, towns and villages, but even 4 provinces. In that case I think it will be relatively easy to expand it from 7 million to 10 million. A different industrial revolution alone could work. Philips starts not in Eindhovn, but a city close enough to the randstad to connect to it, which grows just like Eindhoven into the 5th city. You could even connect Tilburg, Breda and Den Bosch to the Randstad (which would includes a 5th province).
 
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